War is the overriding focus of the UN General Assembly in New York, and Western momentum behind Ukraine hangs in the balance. President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to the UN to urge allies not to “let up on our support” until “Ukraine wins a just and durable peace”. Yet with the US still blocking the use of long-range missiles to strike deep within Russia, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal to Biden yesterday, Western focus appears, instead, to be shifting to the need for serious peace negotiations with Russia.
The growing consensus behind a realist approach was exemplified by Czech President Petr Pavel in a New York Times interview published this week. Pavel, a former Nato Military Committee Chairman, said “the most probable outcome of the war will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily.” Both sides will need to make compromises; Pavel added that “to talk about a defeat of Ukraine or a defeat of Russia — it simply will not happen.”
Calls from a president known in his country as an anti-Russian Nato hawk for Kyiv to be “realistic” are an indication of how Western opinion is shifting. In the Czech Republic, as elsewhere in Europe, those calling for Ukrainian compromise and a negotiated end to the war were long dismissed by politicians as Putin sympathisers. Now, though, the weight of popular opinion behind peace cannot be ignored. Two-thirds of Czechs would support a quick end to the war even if that means Russia keeping Ukrainian territory, while research shows a preference for Ukraine to be pushed into a peace deal over being supported to regain its land among the EU’s three great powers — France, Germany and Italy. Läs artikel